The next thing she felt was a burning sensation in her stomach. She had been shot with a 9mm handgun by an assailant she did not even see. She was rushed to hospital for an operation.

"When I woke up five days later I assumed the baby was gone," she said. "I just couldn't believe it when they showed me her alive.

"The doctors did an X-ray of me but they couldn't find the bullet. Then they found it lodged in my daughter's elbow. They took it out and put a little cast on her arm. It was a miracle. She saved my life. We saved each other."

Her daughter Jessica, the youngest victim of the riots, is today a typical girl about to turn 20. She works as a sales assistant at a Macy's department store and is thinking about becoming a probation officer.

She still has the scar on her elbow where the bullet was removed and her birthday is always bittersweet, a time when she remembers how lucky she is.

"When I was about five I started understanding what had happened, and now I have read a lot about the riots," she said. "I feel bad for all the victims, for people who didn't survive like me. I'm innocent, but there are other innocent people that got hurt too and died.

"I think these days people do get along better with each other. They should get along, and as time goes by I hope that happens more."

Elvira Evers, now 59, moved her family out of their home in Compton to another neighbourhood as soon as she could.

"I saw so many people die, so many people shot, or robbed," she said. "But we have to go forward. I pray to God that people can live their lives together. I see it getting better, and they have cleaned things up, but it's going to take some time."

The riots exploded, on the day before Miss Evers was shot, in reaction to the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers who had been accused of using excessive force against the motorist Rodney King a year earlier.

Ground zero for the violence was the innocuous road junction of Florence Avenue and Normandie Avenue in the impoverished South Central district. There, a white lorry driver called Reginald Denny was dragged from his vehicle and beaten nearly to death, with the drama unfolding live on television.

In the ensuing days the National Guard was called in, 54 people died, more than 2,000 were injured and damage estimated at $1 billion was caused to property.

The Denny beating took place just outside Tom's Liquor Store, a notorious haven for drunks, which became the first of 200 liquor stores in the city to be looted. For the past three years the shop has been owned by James Oh, 62, a Korean-American. It is now clean, tidy and brightly lit. Mr Oh knows all his customers and greets many of them by name or with a cheerful "How you doing my brother?" An off-duty police officer buying whiskey is hailed with "Bring it on, my man!"

Mr Oh said: "I've put my energy into trying to have a community for people here. I hope for the best in this country and to get on. I just make sure I respect people, treat them right, and I have had no problems here."

Despite Mr Oh's optimism, a security guard is still stationed permanently at his door and he is forced to shut at 10pm, conditions that were imposed after the riots. He is not happy about it. "That was 20 years ago, it should be changed. There isn't going to be another riot if we open later," he said. In the blocks surrounding his shop, though, deprivation lingers. There is graffiti marking the turf of the violent street gang Florencia 13.

Thrift stores, coin laundries and crumbling churches predominate, and the doors and windows of homes are protected by an array of prison-like bars. In one side street, two young men were being handcuffed and placed in a police car.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department, times have changed. In 1992, officers from the 77th Street Division, which includes the Florence and Normandie junction, were ordered to abandon their patch, 12 square miles at the heart of South Central, to the mob. That year there were 143 murders. Last year it dropped to 32.

According to Dennis Kato, the 77th's commander, who was a patrol officer during the riots, the streets used to be thick with tension. "You could almost cut it with a knife," he said. "The style of policing was really just suppress, suppress, suppress."

Unlike in 1992, the department now has a communty relations officer and patrols report going for hours without seeing any suspicious activity. In 2006, South Central was renamed South Los Angeles in an attempt to expunge the memory of the riots.

The racial make-up of the LAPD has also changed significantly. In 1992, it was 59 per cent white. It is now down to 37 per cent. Since its nadir in 1992, the force has reached a favourability rating of 70 per cent in city polls. The make-up of South Central itself has also changed with an influx of Hispanics, who comprise 48 per cent of the population of Los Angeles.

Academics now talk of a "post-racial Los Angeles" where unrest is driven not by race relations and fears of gangs, but by the economy and housing market.

For many, though, the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed by a white neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, is evidence that the same problems that caused the riots still exist in America.

Rodney King, now 47, said: "It's about bullying a black man. This time, a young man was bullied to death.